Joseph Brodsky, honored yesterday with a plaque in London, wondered, like Seamus Heaney, if the careful, vulnerable, reflective, poetic voice could make any difference in a cruel, violent, and possibly meaningless world. His poem “A Part of Speech” broods on past (his own past, in Russia), present (he’s now an émigré, finding himself at the moment in Munich), and future (“when ‘the future’ is uttered, swarms of mice / rush out of the Russian language and gnaw a piece / of ripened memory which is twice / as hole-ridden as real cheese” — which is to say that for the poet the very concept of a future is an absurdity).
This past/present/future suggests a temporally dynamic poem, but “A Part of Speech” is Oblomov in successive sonnets, a chronicle of immobilism:
As regards all that parallel-
line stuff, it’s turned out true and bone-clad, indeed.
Don’t want to get up now. And never did.
That immobilism suggests an answer to the question of poetry’s function: It doesn’t have one.
Or it doesn’t have much of a public function. Consciousness it can do a lot for. The reader’s and the poet’s:
A novel or a poem is not a monologue, but the conversation of a writer with a reader, a conversation, I repeat, that is very private, excluding all others – if you will, mutually misanthropic. And in the moment of this conversation a writer is equal to a reader, as well as the other way around, regardless of whether the writer is a great one or not. This equality is the equality of consciousness. It remains with a person for the rest of his life in the form of memory, foggy or distinct; and, sooner or later, appropriately or not, it conditions a person’s conduct. [A] novel or a poem is the product of mutual loneliness – of a writer or a reader… [V]erse writing [and reading] is an extraordinary accelerator of conscience, of thinking, of comprehending the universe…
From his perch in comfortable Western Europe, the poet recalls silent dead village life in the east, where the poetic voice is a whisper of speech, or not even that, between the sound of the waves, a
wan flat voice
that ripples between them like hair still moist,
if it ripples at all.
He recalls (in a beautiful line) “A nowhere winter evening with wine,” and then evokes all the emptiness of that earlier place (“wind battering the limp grass / that submits to it,” “Silvery hoarfrost has transformed the rattling bell / into crystal,” “rows and rows / of swamp in a pine-wooded territory where no scarecrows / ever stand in orchards,” “a tram rattles far off, as in days of yore, / but no one gets off at the stadium anymore.”). And then we get this marvelous stanza:
As for the stars, they are always on.
That is, one appears, then others adorn the inklike
sphere. That’s the best way from there to look upon
here: well after hours, blinking.
The sky looks better when they are off.
Though, with them, the conquest of space is quicker.
Provided you haven’t got to move
from the bare veranda and squeaking rocker.
As one spacecraft pilot has said, his face
half sunk in the shadow, it seems there is
no life anywhere, and a thoughtful gaze
can be rested on none of these.
So there we have, mid-poem, the possibility that it’s all nothingness, no life anywhere. At best a mere ripple of it here. Or as Brodsky once said to one of his memoirists: “You know in the end, none of it matters, what happens to you in your life. Not suffering. Not happiness or unhappiness. Not illness. Not prison. Nothing.”
But there’s more poem, so let’s see…
Well, there’s love:
A voice
pitches high, keeping words on a string of sense.
… The heart, however grown savage, still beats for two.
Every good boy deserves fingers to indicate
that beyond today there is always a static to-
morrow, like a subject’s shadowy predicate.
The voice of his lover trills with meaning, and however nihilistic the heart, it seems hardwired to exist in a world of mutuality – a mutuality that promises a future, however “static” that future in fact turns out to be.
And there’s poetry itself (“the pen that puts up these limping / awkward lines”), which can at least hear and record humanity’s voice:
On occasion the head combines
its existence with that of a hand, not to fetch more lines
but to cup an ear under the pouring slur
of their common voice
For after all
What gets left of a man amounts
to a part. To his spoken part. To a part of speech.
The poet concludes that he is “tired of summer,” tired of the warmth of Munich, and drawn to memories of frozen villages. Echoing the famous first lines of The Waste Land, the poet finds that he prefers the nihilistically appropriate eastern winter to the annoyingly lifelike western summer:
If only winter were here for snow to smother
all these streets, these humans; but first, the blasted
green. I would sleep in my clothes or just pluck a borrowed
book, while what’s left of the year’s slack rhythm,
like a dog abandoning its blind owner,
crosses the road at the usual zebra.
And then he concludes the poem with a bracingly realistic definition of freedom:
Freedom
is when you forget the spelling of the tyrant’s name
and your mouth’s saliva is sweeter than Persian pie,
and though your brain is wrung tight as the horn of a ram
nothing drops from your pale-blue eye.
Freedom is nothing glorious and fine and uplifting and large; it is simply the gradual Oblomovlike forgetting of enslavement. It is the capacity to experience despair – as this poet is experiencing despair – without weeping. The capacity to bear the metaphysical weight of the world – east and west – without collapsing.
The soaring oratory of Maurice Clarett. As UD readers know, UD has long recommended exactly the same thing for the B-School Boys (see her ever-popular category Beware the B-School Boys) — charismatic ex-cons drawn from the same crowd as their audience. Andy “Enron” Fastow is one example, but America’s prisons are packed with ciceronian swindlers.
Together, these two lad-categories (football hero/captain of industry) make up much of our national mythology, and therefore America’s institutions continue to deal gently with them, which is why remarkable numbers of them keep raping women and financial systems.
UD is a big believer in the power of testifying. She thinks Business Ethics courses are bullshit, but she thinks Madoff on the hustings would be marv.
… here are a few headlines, to get us up to date on guns in America.
IOWA GRANTS PERMISSION FOR BLIND
RESIDENTS TO CARRY GUNS IN PUBLIC
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SLAIN GUN INSTRUCTOR’S FAMILY WANTS LAW
TO BAN CHILDREN FROM AUTOMATIC WEAPONS
(Don’t worry. No chance in hell it’ll pass.)
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AFTER WACO SHOOTOUT,
LAWMAKERS CONTINUE
OPEN CARRY PUSH
(That’ll pass.)
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However.
As Andrew Sullivan used to say:
Know Hope.
It began with the Oct. 24 candidate’s debate at Virginia Tech, the site of the worst mass shooting by an individual in U.S. history. In response to a question, Cuccinelli boasted of his A rating from the NRA.
And then McAuliffe did something surprising: He said he didn’t give a fig about the powerful lobby’s rating. And, oh, by the way, he had earned an F.
McAuliffe won the election.
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The No Hope position:
[G]uns are tools conceived, built, and used for the primary purpose of killing living things very quickly and with very little effort. They are perfect, and whether men and women and children and babies use them correctly or incorrectly, people get maimed or killed. For this reason, it should be illegal, as it is in most of the world, for most citizens to own guns.
This is apparent to many people, even and especially to many people who sell guns. But it is even more apparent that nothing anyone says or writes about how it is an absolute fucking farce that it is legal for most citizens to own guns matters. Episodes like Roanoke, and Sandy Hook, and Aurora, and Blacksburg, and Charleston affirm that the fight is already lost.
Of course, this is what big-time football brings to the university, house of reason. It brings the adorable primitivism of humanity’s infancy. Like fraternities, to which it is symbiotically attached, it brings “shirtless kids covered in paint, shivering in the November weather as they cheer their team on,” as one pundit excitedly puts it. The same writer goes on to say:
If you want your students to become loyal, giving alumni, you must turn them into members of a tribe. You must make them fall in love with their school, and believe that they and all the other alums are united in a family. Your temple of reason cannot rise to the heavens unless it is grounded in irrational love.
Tribalism: The core of any great university. I think that’s what we’re all after, isn’t it? Students come to us already members of high school cliques and neighborhood gangs; our purpose is to strengthen those cultic tendencies.
But it’s not just tribal, magical thinking we’re after. Let’s say it straight out – it’s ultimately stupidity we want to convey:
[T]wo schools [Kansas and Notre Dame] [are] now paying Weis nearly $23 million not to coach.
Now, this is how you write.
But before I get to that – Let me just say how much SOS likes it when she is brought, through idle online pecking, to a piece of writing that she loves. The last piece of writing she liked as much as Drew Jubera’s essay for GQ on southern-football junior colleges was about trailer parks, and she lighted on that piece in the same way.
The specific trail that took me to Jubera’s piece involved UD‘s interest in Zeke Pike. Zeke Pike is a superfuckup who plays really good football. Quarterback even. Plus Zeke has a great football name.
Zeke has now flushed out of three RDQ (Rapidly Descending Quality) schools onaccounta the fuckupery (do you really, at this point, need details?) — Auburn, Louisville, and Morgan State. UD was going to write a post speculating about the fourth school Zeke will attend (possible post titles: SNEAK PEAK, ZEKE. IS PIKE PAST PEAK?) (Pike’s Peak: Get it?), but she was having trouble coming up with the next RDQ school…
Then she read this comment on the article about him to which she linked up there.
They are desperate for a QB in East Mississippi.
So off she Googled to East Mississippi Community College, star of Jubera’s GQ piece. SOS offers some excerpts. Watch carefully. The guy knows how to write.
First paragraph – Setting the scene.
The landscape is drunk Faulkner: small and spooky and piss-poor. Piney woods run deep enough to hide whatever you don’t want found. What passes for the old downtown is one side of one block. Five brick buildings still stand; another four are gone, just disappeared, as if by cremation — nothing left but rubble and little piles of red dust. Drive by most days and the only open business is a working Coke machine on the sidewalk.
With the next excerpt, you note that one of the things Jubera’s got going is a wonderful back and forth between highfalutin (Faulkner) and lowfalutin (piss-poor). See how he continues the trick.
To local existentialists, it makes perfect sense. “There’s a lot to offer in Scooba, Mississippi. Want to know what it is?” Nick Clark, a white-haired former Lion who works in the school’s development office, asks me from across his desk.
I allow that I am totally stumped.
“There are no distractions!”
Existentialists. We’re going to keep this going, this glorious juxtaposition – not just because it’s funny and rich, suggesting at once the reality of the place, and the consciousness ol’ Jubera (and his readers) are bringing with them when they visit Scooba, but because many of the people Jubera talks to are self-conscious at quite a high level about their existence.
[The school’s] roster does tend to over-represent the discarded and dispossessed: lawbreakers, rule-benders, dropouts, dipshits, potheads, and assorted other screwups — almost all of whom can flat-out ball. Coaches recruit kids from houses without food, without parents, without floors. One coach sat across from a mother who stared back at him with four eyes. “She had a pair of eyeballs tattooed right over her titties,” he told me. “It gets surreal sometimes.”
Noticing some similarities to the article on trailer parks UD also loved? And notice too how the high/low thing keeps working: dipshits/surrealism.
Now to meet the coach:
The glassy eyes of an eight-point buck stare me down from a back wall as Buddy greets me from a big padded chair behind his big wooden desk. Buddy is big, too: A former center, he’s short and wide and rounded off at the edges. One of his chins sprouts a white goatee.
Buddy spits Red Man tobacco into a Diet Coke bottle. Originally from Alabama, he’s still Bama enough to name his yellow Lab Bama. Now 49, Buddy has said he got into coaching because he wasn’t smart enough to do anything else. He’d really like you to believe that. Tucked between the sports books on his shelves: Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.
A typical Buddy takeaway: “As a rule of thumb, big fish eat little fish.”
… “I try to be self-actualized enough,” [Buddy later] says, “to realize I’m an asshole.”
Can Jubera sketch a character in six sentences? Are you fucking kidding me? And another existentialist/surrealist! (Would have been even better if the book were Trout Fishing in America. Higher-level surrealism-consciousness.)
And again: Lyrical plus sordid:
Later that evening, in heavy air that feels more like bathwater, [the] players jog onto a practice field they share with the adjoining agricultural high school. The cornfield across the road and the little Baptist church beside it turn gold, then pink, then indigo in the sun’s lowering light.
It’s still football: Coaches bark insults, players run into one another, fights threaten to break out. A fat kid bends over after running gassers and pukes.
Gassers and pukes. The sun’s lowering light. Can you get enough of this stuff? SOS can’t get enough of this stuff.
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Update: The notorious woman-beater De’Andre Johnson has “made his way to East Mississippi Community College.”
… is a little tricky. Sure, you’re promoting yourself, making yourself look interesting, etc. But you don’t want to go too far. You don’t want to look like a braggart.
Of the many home pages UD has read, none has come anywhere near that of Jonathan Sacks for throwing humility – even faux humility – to the winds and beyond. Sacks, a rabbi, has in the past lamented that
Humility is the orphaned virtue of our age… Humility — true humility — is one of the most expansive and life-enhancing of all virtues … True virtue never needs to advertise itself. That is why I find the aggressive packaging of personality so sad. It speaks of loneliness, the profound, endemic loneliness of a world without relationships of fidelity and trust. It testifies ultimately to a loss of faith…
So let’s see… On his home page, Sacks introduces himself as a “moral voice for our time.” He quotes “H.R.H. The Prince of Wales” calling him “a light unto this nation.” He quotes Tony Blair calling him “an intellectual giant.”
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As a moral voice for our time, Sacks has a whole lot to say about, well, morality. Pages and pages and pages on how we should live, what’s good, what’s bad. He obviously takes his moral voice for our time gig very seriously.
And yet beyond the perhaps small matter of his hypocrisy in regard to humility, there’s the more pressing matter of where he gets his money.
His academic position is funded by Ira Rennert. Sacks is the Ira Rennert Professor of whatever. And Ira Rennert has just been for the second time found guilty of looting one of his businesses to pay for a personal residence so psychotically ostentatious (it’s the largest and most expensive private house in America – kind of the concrete embodiment of the Sacks home page) that during his first trial his lawyer “demanded that photos of it not be shown, arguing that doing so would inflame the jury.” He bought a business, forced it into bankruptcy, took all of its money, and built a house for himself with it. Two judges have told him he has to give the looted money back. Rennert will, of course, keep appealing.
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Oh, and he gave some of the looted funds to Sacks.
Also to another man of heavy virtue, Joseph Lieberman, Rennert Professor of something else.
There’s a lot of other stuff about their benefactor – involving payment of taxes, industrial pollution, and eh you don’t wanna know.
And Sacks and Lieberman certainly don’t want to know. That’s their prerogative. But they should stop posing as moralists.
The acting chancellor at the University of Illinois Champaign Urbana now announces, shortly after the departure of Phyllis Wise, the departure of the provost.
Acting chancellor, interim provost. Yikes.
No link because it hasn’t hit the news yet.
UD thanks W.
